6 stories
Morocco as set, subject, and backdrop. The films made here and the industry that grew from the light.
When the desert plays other deserts
Morocco has doubled for ancient Rome, biblical Jerusalem, Tibet, and Mars. It has played Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and itself. The landscape is a character actor — endlessly versatile, never quite the star.
A thousand years of spectacle on one square
Every evening in Jemaa el-Fna, the storytellers rebuild the world from scratch.
Paul Bowles came for a visit and never left. His Tangier became literature.
Paul Bowles arrived in Tangier in 1947, thinking he'd stay a few months. He stayed 52 years. His novel 'The Sheltering Sky' became the template for every American who ever dreamed of losing themselves in North Africa.
Sixty years of Hollywood building ancient worlds in the Moroccan desert
When Ridley Scott needed to rebuild ancient Rome, he went to Ouarzazate. David Lean came first, for Lawrence of Arabia. Then Game of Thrones, Kingdom of Heaven, The Mummy, Babel. The desert has been playing other places for sixty years.
Christopher Nolan is filming Homer in Morocco. The geography is closing a 2,800-year loop.
Christopher Nolan is filming The Odyssey in Morocco. It's the biggest production the country has ever hosted, and the location choice is more than practical. The ancient Greeks believed the western edge of their world was here. Nolan is shooting their mythology where they imagined it happened.
The most famous movie set in Morocco was never filmed there
Not a single frame of Casablanca was shot in Casablanca. The entire film was made on a Warner Bros. sound stage in Burbank, California, by a Hungarian director who had never been to Morocco, based on a play by a New York schoolteacher who visited once.
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